SeaPort Airlines drops the ball on Muscle Shoals-to-Nashville route – Not enough pilots – Routes in two other Seaport Cities curtailed

THE SHOALS – Northwest Shoals Regional Airport Director, Barry Griffith, in an e-mail to The Quad-Cities Daily, laid out a seemingly bleak future for regularly scheduled air service. SeaPort Airlines has been cancelling flights on a regularly occurring basis for the past 3 months, due in part to weather. But the most ominous reason for recent flight cancellations has been a lack of qualified pilots to operate the fleet of Cessna Caravans. The pilot shortage was announced at last month’s Chamber of Commerce Air Services Committee meeting. At that meeting, airline officials explained that a new class of pilots had been hired; that they were in training and the problem shouldn’t get much worse than the in the past few weeks.

The problem, explained Griffith at the meeting was the nationwide shortage of commuter airline pilots. The shortage, Griffith said, is due to the hiring demand generated in the major airlines because of the many age-related retirements in those fleets. SeaPort Air indicated that they had more than a half-dozen pilot resignations in one week alone.

Airport Director Barry Griffith

In his e-mail to The Quad-Cities Daily, Griffith even suggested that SeaPort itself might be in existential jeopardy. Here, in part if Griffith’s statement, “The industry shortage of airline pilots is wreaking havoc on the small, regional airlines.  SeaPort Airlines is unable to maintain its abbreviated schedule attached which equates to nearly no airline service at MSL.  While we are hopeful that this crisis will subside some in the near future, we are uncertain as to how long this problem will exist and even if SeaPort will survive for much longer.”

Northwest Shoals Regional Airport has seen a severe downturn in flights out of Muscle shoals to connecting airports in the past several years. Due in a very large part to the airline industry restructuring of the past 15 years, the Airport has suffered with the number of passenger boardings. As such, the Federal Aviation Administration, which pays a subsidy to maintain service from here to Nashville, has threatened to defund the program. Northwest Shoals was given a one-year reprieve to give it time to get its boardings back up. The previous airline, Florida-based Silver Airlines almost single handedly put the FAA’s funding in criticality. Silver was here on a two year contract, but for the last months of the contract, failed to provide service.

In the last several weeks, SeaPort Airlines has reportedly announced that it is ending flights between Greenville, Mississippi and Memphis in September. Last week, WTVA-TV reported that SeaPort has cut the number of flights in and out of Tupelo’s airport.

The Quad-Cities Daily has reached out to Shoals Airport officials for their comment on this development. We will publish their take on this issue when a statement is available.